Sustainable biochar is a powerfully simple tool to fight global warming. This 2,000 year-old practice converts agricultural waste into a soil enhancer that can hold carbon, boost food security, and discourage deforestation. It’s one of the few technologies that is relatively inexpensive, widely applicable and quickly scalable.
We really can’t afford not to pursue it.
IBI 2010: September 12 - 15, 2010 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
What Leading Visionaries are Saying About Biochar
"If you could continually turn a lot of organic material into biochar, you could, over time, reverse the history of the last two hundred years...We can, literally, start sucking some of the carbon that our predecessors have poured into the atmosphere down through our weeds and stalks and stick it back in the ground. We can run the movie backward. We can unmine some of the coal, undrill some of the oil. We can take at least pieces of the Earth and – this is something we haven’t done for quite a while – leave them Better Than We Found Them.”
~ Bill McKibben, author, climate activist and founder of 350.org
Latest Developments in Biochar
Practioner Profile: Biochar Engineering Corporation
Jim Fournier is among a handful of pioneers who have been working on biochar since before the word "biochar" existed. He helped convene the first US meeting on agricultural charcoal at the University of Georgia in June 2004, cofounded Eprida in 2005, and was present at the birth of the IBI in July 2006. Later that year, he founded Biomass Energy & Carbon with one of the preeminent experts in the world on biomass gasification and pyrolysis, Tom Reed. In April 2009, BEC restructured as Biochar Engineering Corp to focus exclusively on biochar production equipment. BEC's facility is located in Golden, Colorado, United States.
BEC's core mission is to accelerate the creation of the biochar industry. Fournier believes that it will take several years of field-scale agricultural trials before the biochar market will really take off and reach its full potential of gigaton-scale carbon sequestration. BEC focuses on the development of smaller scale modular units, which can be deployed now and will continue to offer environmental and social benefits in the long run.
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Photo: the U3 unit in action; courtesy of BEC
Practioner Profile: Using Improved Cookstoves and Biochar in Western Kenya
The African Christians Organization Network (ACON) has been working in Western Kenya since 2000 to empower villagers by providing opportunities for development that are environmentally sustainable. Since 2004, they have been focusing their work on how to reduce deforestation while improving soils for local farmers in the area. Part of this solution is improved cookstoves and the use of biochar.
The Bungoma district of Western Kenya is 30 miles from Uganda border and near a national forest. Villagers living in the area are mainly farmers who rely on annual rains for all irrigation so water becomes crucial during the dry season. For cooking, they use a traditional 3 stone open fire, requiring a great deal of firewood and creating a lot of smoke. When Salim Mayeki Shaban of ACON started investigating fuel use in Bungoma, he found that the population was using primarily forested land for firewood. The high fuel demand was quickly deforesting the area and some had been taking wood illegally from the national forest. To alleviate the pressure on the forest, Salim designed a project that would work with local villagers to promote energy conservation and reduce deforestation through the use of improved cooking stoves, designing biochar producing stoves, training local farmers on application and utilization of biochar, and making fuel briquettes from water hyacinth and other biomass materials (not from the forest).
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Photo: Setting up field trials at a village with biochar; courtesy of Salim Mayeki Shaban
Practitioner Profile: Biochar at Heritage High
By Tom Miles
On April 30th, IBI’s Kelpie Wilson and I attended an energy fair at Heritage High School in Vancouver, Washington. For the past few months, Kelpie and I have been helping teachers and students at the school learn about biochar. Teacher Darlyn Wendlandt started the program last year when a friend told her about biochar. She knew that the kids do best with hands-on learning, so she searched the Internet for an appropriate project. She found Kelpie’s presentation on her backyard biochar retort-kiln and was especially interested in the pizza oven Kelpie had incorporated in the top of the kiln. School rules prohibit open fires on school property, so she brought a group of students to her own backyard where they built and fired the retort-kiln last fall. But when the students wanted to demonstrate the project at school for the annual energy fair, they had to find an alternative to wood for firing the kiln.
Darlyn Wendlandt and shop teacher Jim Neiman, whose welding class fabricated the retort, saw the problem as an opportunity to demonstrate one more way that biochar could be integrated with other school projects in renewable energy. They would try using biodiesel to fire the kiln.
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Photo: Teacher Darlyn Wendlandt and students build a brick kiln around the biochar retort; courtesy of Kelpie Wilson.
Practitioner Profile: Burt’s Greenhouses: Co-Generation to Heat and Produce Biochar
Burt’s Greenhouses is a family owned business located in Odessa, Ontario, Canada (near Kingston). Brian Burt and Ruth Hayward started the business in 1981, and they grow and sell annuals, perennials and shrubs directly to consumers as well as through garden centers. In the winter their heating requirements are 50,000 square feet (4,600 m2) of greenhouses, heated by hot water from pyroylized biomass. The biomass feedstock consists of wood waste, mostly from used shipping pallets and “clean” construction waste (i.e. wood not treated with heavy metals or other toxic substances). Brian and employee Alex English, who had previous experience with pyrolysis technology, have been inventing and modifying current hardware (and software!) to improve the efficiency and cleanliness of their continuous pyrolysis process and allow the production of biochar.
The chipped wood feedstock is kept in a covered storage area and is fed into the grate stoker (pyrolysis unit) by computer-controlled augers and conveyer belts. All the air supply inside the stoker is controlled both under and over the fuel. To achieve constant air supply, the Burt’s installed an air lock and better valves on the stoker. Above-fuel air input is automatically controlled using real-time input from an oxygen sensor in the smoke stack. The net effect of these changes to air supply is an optimization of the fuel to air ratio resulting in the lowest possible emissions and highest possible efficiencies. By increasing the grate speed and reducing the amount of under-fuel air, the process can produce varying amounts of biochar (0 – 23%).
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Photo: Installing the unit at the greenhouse; courtesy of Burt's Greenhouses
Practitioner Profile: World Stove: Transforming Haiti and the World
WorldStove founder Nathaniel Mulcahy has just completed two months of work in Haiti, setting up a pilot project that will provide biochar-producing stoves and jobs for the Haitian people. The project was featured in an Earth Day press release from the UN Special Envoy to Haiti (former President Clinton) as an example of "building back better" by incorporating environmental sustainability in the recovery effort.
Before WorldStove, Mulcahy was an award-winning industrial designer creating consumer products for large corporations like Emerson Appliances. Eight years ago, while lying in bed recovering from a life-threatening accident, he realized that he needed to focus his energies on innovative designs to improve the quality of life for people who were less fortunate. The result was his invention of the fuel efficient, low emissions LuciaStove, named after the canine companion who saved his life.
The original breakthrough that set the LuciaStove apart from similar gasifer stoves was Mulcahy's patented design which uses Bernoulli-principle-driven venturis to create a negative pressure while a flame cap based on Fibonacci spiral geometry prevents oxygen from entering the pyrolysis chamber (this is the shape emblazoned in the World Stove logo). The combination delivers better air control for cleaner combustion of the gases produced from the biomass it uses as fuel. It also produces a nitrogen gas charged biochar (the stove excludes oxygen but not nitrogen) that has a nearly neutral pH (7-7.5) making it ideal for many agricultural applications.
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Photo: The blue flame indicates that the Haiti Lucia stove is burning cleanly and efficiently; courtesy of World Stove
Profile: Senegalese Farmers Using Innovative Garden Project to Boost Productivity
Originally posted on Voice of America by Amanda Fortier | Dakar 21 April 2010
A new gardening project in Senegal is addressing issues of food security, poverty and climate change. Super Vegetable Gardens are hoping to help small-scale farmers throughout Senegal and in tropical areas around the world.
Seventy kilometers northeast of Senegal's capital, Dakar, is a long stretch of highway dotted with sprawling baobab trees, leading close to Keur Madaro village.
Here, under the prickling African sun and on a land that is mostly dry and dusty, ten vegetable gardens overflow with green leafy vegetables.
Last June, a new agricultural initiative known as super vegetable gardens was introduced in Senegal. Nearly a year later, there are more than 150 such gardens throughout the country.
It is the result of 30 years of research that was first field tested in Niger in 2007, as a collaboration between the international aid group Pro-Natura and the French firm JTS Seeds.
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Photo: JTS Semences
Practitioner Profile: Dynamotive; Building Biochar Technologies and Markets
Dynamotive Energy Systems Corporation is a small but dynamic publicly-traded Canadian company led by former oil trader Andrew Kingston. Kingston's vision over the last decade as the CEO was to produce renewable energy from waste biomass rather than from food crops. With his grounding in the oil business, he realized early on that a robust distributed supply chain would be integral to the company's success.
The company's search for under-utilized waste led them to Erie Flooring and Wood Products, in West Lorne, Ontario, where piles of hardwood sawdust and wood chips could provide the ideal feedstock for Dynamotive's patented fast pyrolysis process. Today, Dynamotive's West Lorne pyrolysis plant has the capacity to process about 130 metric tons of dry biomass per day. The yield from the fast pyrolysis process of sawdust is about 70% bio-oil, 20% biochar and 10% syngas, which is recycled to provide fuel for the burner to heat the pyrolysis reactor.
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Diagram: The Dynamotive fast pyrolysis process; courtesy of Dynamotive